Thursday, August 13, 2009

And the impossible has occurred. After witnessing crazy white person upon crazy white person avail themselves of handheld microphones at various town halls across America, and after seeing Sarah Palin start putting made-up death panel footnotes--FOOTNOTES!--in her Facebook wall comments, the time has finally come to get back on the bucking horse of shiny bullshit that is blogging and get to work.

First up, my former Senator (and for a time, boss, as intern) Chuck Grassley.

Chuck! You used to be so much fun! Folksy and funny. Closeted populist.

The guy used to walk around his Senate office joking, "Anybody mad at me?"

What happened, girlfriend?

Methinks it's a little thing called Jesus. Well. More like Jesus and his magical hold on the GOP, a.k.a. defensive, uncomfortable white people.

So, go back about 9 years. It all starts with a very special day for the Grassley interns, a day that happens at the very end of your tenure as, basically, a white kid who sits in the auto-pen closet and signs letters to constituents back home for a few hours a day. Anyway, Chuck takes the interns to the Senate cafeteria for lunch. And at said lunch, yours truly, a government major at Georgetown and all around Iowa Boy made the big mistake of asking Chuck whether he would charactize his conservative philosophy as effectively a Midwestern form of libertarian populism.

Chuck did not like this.

I'm back, kids. And this time I'm going to edit less and write harder. You betcha.

The Federalist Papers, Number 10:

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.